Creative Arabic Calligraphy in Adobe Illustrator

By Almojahed | Illustrator

This tutorial will guide you on how to draw creative Arabic fonts in Adobe Illustrator, this type of calligraphy is called "Free Calligraphy" as it is not "restricted" to a strictly set of rules on how the letters should be drawn and connected as with other forms of Arabic Calligraphy. You can learn more about the art of Arabic and Islamic Calligraphy from Wikipedia's page on this topic.

The image above reads "Hajj", which is the Arabic word for "Pilgrimage". We are going to create this word in Illustrator using the "Path Tool". It is possible to follow this tutorial on almost any other vector based drawing program such as Xara X, Freehand, and Corel Draw. Our tutorial will show you an example on how to create an Arabic in a free calligraphy manner, you can apply the same technique to create cool looking text in Arabic or English.

Start off by creating a new Illustrator file. We will start by drawing the "Alef" letter, which is the stick-looking shape on the right side of the word. Unlike English, Arabic is read from right to left. Use the pen tool to draw a single path point that should make the upper left corner of our "Alef" letter, it should look like a little blue square dot on the canvas.

Move your mouse pointer several pixels to the left and then click to create another dot that shall automatically connect to our first one. Create another dot at the lower part of the screen to draw an inverted L shape.

You get the point now, connect the dots to get a shape similar to the image displayed below.

The first letter is now complete, it is time to work on the rest of the word. Start off by drawing the shape that you see below.

We will now rotate this last brick we created using the Rotate Transform tool. Right-click this shape and then choose Transform > Rotate.

The third part of our word is a little bit harder than the previous two as this one has some curves. Start off by drawing the simple line that you see in the image below. Draw your line from left to right.

HOLD the mouse button as you click to create the third dot in our shape. While the mouse button is still held, move it around to create a slightly curved line.

Continue drawing the rest of the shape, make sure to hold the mouse button and create a curved line when creating the selected corner in the image below.

Creating the rest of the shape should not be a problem now. Connect the dots and hold the mouse button to create curvy lines when needed.

The only step left to complete our project here is drawing a circle at the bottom. Your final result should look something similar to what we have below after a little bit of colouring!

This concludes our tutorial, feel free to post at the forum if you needed any more help.